


Ewigkeit

by moodyme



Series: death was a joke [1]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Blood, Blood Drinking, Blood and Injury, Blood and Violence, Curses, Dhampir!Ronan, F/M, Falling In Love, Hunter!Blue, M/M, Revenant!Noah, Tragedy, Turned!Adam, Vampire!Gansey, alternate good ending
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-29
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:08:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25138198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moodyme/pseuds/moodyme
Summary: “Oh,” Ronan said, dragging out the syllable. “She must be strong, then. For a human. I repeat, so it’s just your masochis-““I’m not a masochist!” Gansey hissed.“Well, gosh, then I guess you wouldn’t have wanted me to spit in your tea. You know, ‘cause you aren’t a masochist.”Gansey, horrified, looked up to find their waitress staring down at him. Her face was dreadfully blank as she placed their sweet teas down on the table.
Relationships: Richard Gansey III & Adam Parrish, Richard Gansey III & Ronan Lynch, Richard Gansey III/Blue Sargent, Ronan Lynch & Adam Parrish, Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Series: death was a joke [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1854091
Comments: 11
Kudos: 38





	Ewigkeit

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Will I ever finish anything on this site? Who knows. But this I will, since it is 90% done. Also, I wasn’t going to post this at all, but then I decided I was happy with it and that that’s what ultimately matters, so 🤷🏻♀️
> 
> Ewigkeit - German for Eternity.  
> Title is taken from the musical Tanz der Vampire.
> 
> Side note - the vampire lore presented here is an amalgamation of everything from Serbian folk history to anime. Make of that what you will.
> 
> Finally, heed the tags my friends.

Ronan Lynch had his leather bands in his mouth, using the thick scent he coated them with to cover the stench of all the humans around them in the cafe.

Their smell was something that hadn’t bothered Gansey for several decades now, but then, he was older then Ronan. Full blooded, too. He could be around humans, and the scent of their blood, in crowds without getting too overwhelmed.

He think humans themselves have the same ability, that if they smell something bad for long enough, their brain and olfactory sense will eventually adapt and get used to it.

Gansey wondered if Ronan ever will. He had been friends with the Dhampir for more than 500 years, but he also just wasn’t well enough versed in all of Dhampir physiology to know if Ronan’s continued aversion to the smell of human blood would ever diminish.

Gansey wondered, too, if it was Ronan’s human side that made his aversion so strong.

“You’re thinking too much,” Ronan hissed around his leather bands.

“Sorry,” Gansey said, immediately.

Ronan rolled his eyes so hard Gansey thought it might have actually been painful for him.

“The waitress keeps staring.”

“At me?”

“No,” Ronan rolled his eyes again. “At Monet.”

Gansey frowned. Jean-Claude had been his friend, Ronan’s too, and there was no need to use him for something as vapid as sarcasm.

“Ronan,” he said, using his more stern voice. Chastising Ronan had become more then a habit, it was fully ingrained in his very being at this point, as natural to him as breathing was to humans. “Be serious. At me?”

“At you.”

“Really?” Gansey asked, glancing towards the kitchen their waitress had disappeared into a few minutes ago. He was pleased with the idea of her noticing him in the same way he had noticed her.

Ronan narrowed his eyes, though whether it was in suspicion or curiosity Gansey couldn’t tell.

“Are you hungry?”

Gansey would have laughed if he weren’t so shocked. Hungry? Was Ronan suggesting- no. Surely not. He hadn’t fed on a human since the 1920s. Which Ronan knew, of course. He had been there after all.

“Curious,” Gansey answered, shaking his head.

Now it was Ronan’s turn to look shocked.

“About that?” Ronan exclaimed in disbelief. “She has the personality of Don Rickles - if Don Rickles was feeling particularly mean.”

Gansey sighed. “Yes. She was rather insulting towards me.”

“Oh,” Ronan leaned back in the booth. “So that’s what this is - your natural masochistic tendencies shining through.”

The comment annoyed Gansey, and he opened his mouth to tell him just that when his mind snagged on what he himself had just said.

“She was insulting towards me.”

“And you’re a masochist so of course that gets you all twitterpated,” Ronan mocked.

“Ronan,” Gansey said, leaning forward in his seat and forcing Ronan to make eye contact with him. “She was _insulting to me._ ”

Realization flashed in Ronan’s eyes as he cast a look at the kitchen. He still looked relaxed, was still leaning casually against the back of the booth, was still drumming a mindless tune against the table with his finger tips. But Gansey knew Ronan, and he recognized the edge in his slow smile, the danger that lurked beneath the surface of his careless attitude.

“Oh,” Ronan said, dragging out the syllable. “She must be strong, then. For a human. I repeat, so it’s just your masochis-“

“I’m not a masochist!” Gansey hissed.

“Well, gosh, then I guess you wouldn’t have wanted me to spit in your tea. You know, ‘cause you aren’t a masochist.”

Gansey, horrified, looked up to find their waitress staring down at him. Her face was dreadfully blank as she placed their sweet teas down on the table.

“Miss,” Gansey sputtered, glancing at her name tag to discover her name was Blue, “please forgive me, I was just explaining to my friend here that-“

“That you aren’t a masochist. I know. I heard. Pretty sure the family behind you did too, and that’s why they’re leaving,” She scoffed. “Are you ready to order food?”

“A large sausage with-“ Ronan cast a wicked smirk at him. “Avocado if you have it. And a large Hawaiian for me.”

Blue gagged. “You are both abominations.”

Ronan bit out a harsh laugh before giving her a shark-like smile. “You have no idea.”

“Okay, let me get this straight,” Adam sighed. His voice was tinny and muffled through the poor quality of their phone’s speakers, and Gansey wished desperately that he were with Adam in the flesh, and not separated by an entire ocean. “Your waitress was able to resist your Vampiric charm?”

Vampiric charm. It was what Adam had taken to calling Gansey’s, and every other full- or pure-blooded vampires, natural ability to persuade, unwittingly control, and, well, charm humans. It was natural because no one had yet learned to control it, or turn it off. Because of it, humans found it impossible to go against them in any manner. Ronan had once observed that it was like Gansey was constantly using a Jedi mind trick. Gansey couldn’t quite find fault with that observation.

It had another name, of course. An ancient name. But Gansey liked Adam’s word better. It wasn’t quite as gruesome sounding.

“So what are we thinking?” Adam asked around a yawn. Gansey peered at his watch and did a quick calculation. It was only 4 a.m where Adam was, he had probably woken him up. His guilt stung.

“Honestly?” Gansey plucked a journal from his shelf, one from the early 1800s. “I don’t know. That she’s able to resist me would usually mean she is a Dhampir - or descended from one, maybe.”

Adam hummed in acknowledgement. “Or that she is just a strong human. Psychic, maybe. Or a witch.”

“She would have to be a true psychic, then, or a true witch. And there aren’t that many of them left.”

“A few hundred, probably more. Enough that it isn’t impossible.”

“Just improbable,” Gansey said, “Or less probable then the Dhampir suggestion, anyway.”

Gansey heard papers being shuffled from Adam’s end of the line, like he was searching for something. Besides that, he was utterly silent for a long time.

It gave Gansey the chance to flip through his old journal and find the particular entry he has looking for. He knew which journal it would be, because the incident he had written about was still so sharp in his mind.

He paused at an entry he hadn’t thought about in a long time. Though the paper was somewhat yellowed and the ink a bit duller, the entry still detailed the time he had come across a coven of witches in what was then Wallachia, but was now Romania. It had happened just before the event he had been looking for - the time he had chased a rumor about a possible descendant of Arnold Paole.

“There used to be less Dhampirs then witches,” Adam finally huffed, interrupting his reading and his memories. “Did you know that?”

Yes, Gansey knew that. He still remembered that time, too, which Adam was well aware of. But so long as there were pure-bloods like Gansey, there would be only more and more Dhampirs. Witches, on the other hand, didn’t have abilities that were able to be passed down through their blood, through their DNA. A witch couldn’t give birth to more witches in the way that vampires, either through natural children or through Turning, could.

The witches he had met on that strange autumn evening had been spectacularly angry at Gansey about this strange fact of nature, and were determined to try and sacrifice him over it.

What they hadn’t know, what Gansey suspected no witch or psychic or vampire hunter knew, was that Gansey couldn’t be killed. Because, unlike the much more common Dhampirs or Turned, pure-bloods like him couldn’t _be_ killed.

Expect for by their soulmate.

This truth was one Gansey wouldn’t even believe in if it weren’t for the bloody and gory evidence he himself had seen of it.

“Gansey?” Adam called. “Are you listening?”

“No,” Gansey admitted with a wince. He hadn’t noticed Adam had started talking again. “Sorry. What were you saying?”

“I asked if she felt like a Dhampir,” Adam repeated, and Gansey wondered how greatly he was having to resist sighing in frustration. “If Ronan thought she felt like one.”

Gansey shook his head, even though he knew Adam couldn’t see it. “No, neither of us felt anything. Ronan said she really, uh, stank though?”

“That’s hardly helpful.” This time Adam did sigh. “Ronan thinks every human stinks.”

“True,” Gansey conceded. “But he said she stank more then most.”

“Again, that’s hardly helpful.”

“But it’s something,” Gansey offered. He moved his fingers over the page he had been reading, when his eyes caught on something he had written that he hadn’t read yet.

_‘- It was then that the witches began chanting, lifting their voices in a type of Dies Irie._

_I feared, for a moment, that perhaps what mother and father had told me was untrue, that I verily well could be killed, not just by my soulmate, but by these ghastly people.  
_

_The moment, however, passed, and the witches song did nothing but make me a little sleepy.  
  
One of the witches, seeing that I yet lived, cast me a most loathsome look and began to hurtle what I perceived to be a terribly foul curse.  
  
Considering the astonished way the other witches watched her, I do believe I am right to assume it was most dreadful indeed and shocking even to her own kind.’_

“Do you believe in curses?” Gansey asked.

“Yes,” Adam said, without hesitation. “What does that have to- do you think she’s cursed?”

“No, no,” Gansey laughed. “Nothing like that. I was just re-reading an old journal entry and got derailed from our conversation. Sorry.”

“Gansey,” Adam’s voice was fond now, used to his tangents in a way only he was. “I’ll ask around, see if anyone knows anything about a witch in- Where did you say you were now?”

“Henrietta. Henrietta, Virginia. A sleepy old village, but beautiful.”

“Right. I’ll see if anyone knows of a witch or psychic there. Maybe a Lycanthrope? Well, anyone that could resist your charm, anyway.”

“I appreciate that,” Gansey told him. He wondered if he could convince Adam to join them, if he should even bother trying to. The answer to that, he knew, would always be yes. “Adam? Maybe you could-“

“Gansey.”

It was instant, and had finally become painless after all these years, Adam’s rejections.

“Gansey,” Adam said again, softer. “I know you’ll go back to the cafe to investigate. Just promise me you’ll be careful?”

And that, that was why Gansey was no longer stung by Adam refusing to join them, him and Ronan, on every adventure. Because Adam, intelligent, pragmatic, sensible, Adam who knew as well as he did that he couldn’t be killed, still always asked him to be careful.

It warmed Gansey, to know Adam cared so deeply. So consistently.

“Aren’t I always?”

“No,” Adam laughed and then sighed. “No, you aren’t.”

Once he finished his call with Adam, he turned to Ronan, who had been slouched against the door of the library since he had picked up his phone, and frowned.

He knew, of course, that Ronan had only been standing there because he knew it was Adam he was calling.

He knew, of course, that Ronan had only been standing there because he wanted to hear Adam’s voice.

He knew, of course, that there was nothing he could do to heal that particular torn look that Ronan was now wearing.

He knew, of course, that Ronan had brought it all upon himself.

With a sigh, he plucked a mint leaf from the plant on his desk and used it as a bookmark to the entry in his journal he had been reading.

“Shall we go for a drive?” He asked, already standing and patting his pocket where his keys were.

He knew he couldn’t heal that particular torn look of his friend’s, but he’d be damned if he didn’t at least do something to distract him from it.

“Oh joy, it’s Mr. Masochist,” Blue said, monotone, when she approached him to take his order. “More gross avocado pizza, you fiend?”

Gansey barely constrained himself from wincing. He knew, very well, that avocado on a pizza was strange. But how could he explain that he had only just started eating them and was obsessed with their creamy texture? That he wanted them on everything he ate?

“A plain cheese this time, please,” he said, even though he really would have preferred another sausage and avocado. “And a strawberry smoothie.”

Blue narrowed her eyes at him. “I was going to say, ‘isn’t a cheese pizza a little too vanilla for a masochist?’, but then your ordered a smoothie with your pizza and offended, oh, just about everyone ever.”

“I’m really not a masochist,” Gansey insisted.

“Isn’t that what a masochist would say?” Blue scoffed. “Smoothies are easier to spit in and hide it, did you know that?”

“No?”

“You’ve never worked in fast food, huh?”

Gansey had never worked anywhere, but before he could say that, Blue turned and marched back to the kitchen. He could hear her grumbling about his pizza and smoothie order the whole way.

He was just finishing a text to his sister, who was mourning the loss of a fledgling who had accidentally died in D.C, when Blue returned, placing his pizza and smoothie down along with a cherry coke before sliding into the seat across from him.

“Okay, so what’s your deal?” She said around the large bite she had taken of the slice she had stolen from his pizza. “Do you order weird food because you, a) think it’s ohemgee so random lol, b) are an adventurous soul, or d) genuinely think its good?”

“Um,” Gansey said, tearing off the crust of his pizza and dunking it into his smoothie. “A little of column b, and a lot of column d?”

Blue, after giving him a horrified look, proceeded to copy him and dunk her own crust in his smoothie. Her face twisted up as she chewed while a shiver ran through her body.

When she sallowed she said, “I think your taste buds are broken.”

Gansey shrugged. He couldn’t deny that his taste buds, in relation to food that wasn’t blood, probably were ‘broken’. He had never cared about flavors so much as he did the texture of foods.

Blue slurped loudly at her Coke, and watched him with a steady gaze. “So, you’re a masochist with broken taste buds. What else is there to...” she circled her pointer finger around him.

“Gansey.”

“Just Gansey?”

He smiled. No, not technically just Gansey, but Gansey was the only part that really mattered, the only name he felt comfortable in these days.

“Just Gansey.”

“Alright, so. What else is there to Just Gansey?”

“I like archeology?” He didn’t say that he had been there when some of it was first being built. That he remembered when 

“Cool, I can dig archeology,” Blue said with a wink. “What else?”

“Um,” Gansey searched for something he could afford to tell her. If she was a witch, or a Dhampir, it couldn’t be too significant. Couldn’t give too much away about who his less resilient comrades were. “I enjoy rowing. Sailing. Anything that gets me on the water.”

“You’d make a cute sailor. What else?”

“I once tipped a cow. Accidentally!” He hurried to say after Blue raised her eyebrows.

“How do you accidentally tip a cow?”

Gansey started in on the story, leaving out the fact that he and Ronan had been trying to drink the cows blood and that they had been in Ireland at the time and that it happened several hundred years ago.  
  
By the time he was finished, Blue had one hand clutching her side while her other hand wiped away an errant tear that had fallen from her laughing so hard.

“I thought cow tipping was a myth!” Blue wheezed.

“It is!” Gansey exclaimed. “Cows don’t even sleep standing up! That’s what makes everything that happened so absurd.”

“Wow,” she said once she had finally regained a bit of her composure. “Just wow.”

“Okay,” Gansey laughed. “Now you.”

“Now me what?”

“Now you tell me what else is there to Blue,” Gansey said. “Besides spitting in people’s drinks.”

Blue leaned in close, conspiratorially. “I don’t really spit into drinks. That’s gross. And probably unhealthy.”

“Oh, so now I know I guess I only know your name. That’s even less then before, really.”

“I like knitting,” Blue said, leaning back and smiling.

“I have a feeling you really just like large needles. What else?”

“I want to study ecology and save the Amazon rain forest. Or, at least try.”

“Lofty,” Gansey said, impressed. “What else?”

Blue seemed to hesitate, and think about her next answer. Finally a slow smile spread over her mouth. “I’ve never been sailing.”

Her smile, it seemed, was infectious, because it quickly spread to Gansey’s face as well.

“That,” he said, “I can remedy.”

He was in a floating mood for the rest of the day. Even Ronan pulling his shirt over his nose and complaining about how much he stank when he strided into the renovated warehouse they shared couldn’t dampen his mood.

Blue paused on the dock midway to Gansey’s boat.

“The _True Love_?” She read.

“Yes,” Gansey said, looking fondly at his little day sailor as it bobbed on the river. “‘ _My, she was yar._ ’”

“Yar?” Blue repeated, blinking in confusion.

“From _The Philadelphia Story?_ Don’t you know it?”

Blue shook her head. “Is it a book? Movie?”

“Movie,” Gansey said. He couldn’t imagine someone not having watched it. He himself had seen it in the theater at least a dozen times. “With Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant. It’s a classic.”

“Oh,” Blue shrugged. As she stepped over and onto the boat, she added, “Doesn’t ring any bells.”

“Well, it’s from the 1940s, and in it, the sail boat they have is called the _True Love_.”

“So you like sailing in rivers?” Blue asked, changing the subject abruptly.

Gansey pushed his boat away from the dock and let it float freely for a moment before letting down the sail.

“I like sailing anywhere,” He finally answered.

“Are we going to float down river? How will we get back?” Blue asked, watching him intently as he maneuvered the ropes and sail rudder.

“Ronan- my friend I was with before?” He waited until Blue nodded her remembrance. “He’ll pick us up with the boat trailer and bring it back here.”

“He’s surly.”

Gansey gave her an apologetic smile.

He couldn’t deny that Ronan was surly. Nor could he tell her that his bark was worse then his bite. He also couldn’t tell her that he hadn’t always been like that. That there had been a time when Ronan’s smile had been so free, his laughter so sunny, his heart so large and open. They had been young then, even by human standards, and Ronan had not yet been shattered and reshaped by the hands of tragedy.

Gansey wondered if he would ever stop mourning that Ronan.

Blue, perhaps sensing the melancholy he could feel whispering at him, started in on a ridiculous story about her boss, a mercurial fellow who refused to call her by her name.

“So he calls you Jane?” Gansey exclaimed, surprised at the blatant disrespect.

“Yes,” Blue moaned, her hands in her head. “Because, and I quote, ‘it’s much easier, dear’. How?” Blue demanded, lifting her head to give Gansey a bewildered look. “How is it easier? Both have four letters, both have a single syllable, so how is it easier?”

Gansey shook his head, as confused as Blue at the reasoning. “It is indeed quite the quagmire.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t get so worked about about it,” Blue sighed. “I mean, he’s an old man. Really old. Also, his dogs name is Dog.”

“That is-“ Gansey coughed to hide a laugh. “Capitol ‘D’, Dog?”

Blue slowly nodded, in something like resignation.

“Astounding.”

They spent several hours together, sometimes trading stories, sometimes silently listening to the water lapping at the boat.

It was the most pleasant afternoon he had had in some time, and he wasn’t at all surprised to find he was genuinely sorry when they came to the spot where they were to meet Ronan, who lazily waved at them from the shore as they approached.

He and Ronan were able to easily get the boat on the trailer while Blue and Ronan traded barbs about each other.

“Alright,” Ronan grunted with a slap to the truck. “Where am I dropping you off at, maggot?”

Blue hesitated, shifting from one foot to the other. “Towns fine, I’m working the evening shift, so Nino's if you can.”

“You don’t want to go home first?” Gansey wondered. They had spent the day in the late spring sun, sweating. It couldn’t be pleasant to go into work like that.

Blue gave a stilted smile and insisted she would rather be dropped directly at work, if possible.

As they drove out of the parking out of Nino's, Ronan turned down the dial of the radio, something he had refused to do during their drive from the river to Nino’s.

“She resisted your suggestion.”

“I’m going to call Adam again,” Gansey said, bringing his finger to his lower lip.

Blue was becoming more and more interesting.

The next time he called Adam, he made sure it was at a more reasonable hour for him. But even though it was only the early evening, he still sounded tired and yawned his greeting.

“It’s about Blue,” Gansey said, pacing the floor of his study. “She resisted a suggestion.”

“Your's, or Ronan’s?” Adam demanded, his voice suddenly sharp.

Suggestions were similar to charm, but while the later couldn’t be controlled, the former could. A suggestion from any Vampire was supposed to be more powerful than even Vampiric charm, and one given by a pure-blood was nearly impossible to resist, so Gansey supposed the sharp tone was warranted.

“Mine.”

_“Fuck_ _it!_ ”

Gansey pulled back the phone to gaze at the screen in surprise. It had been years since Gansey last heard a Serbian word pass Adam’s thin lips.

“How?” Adam continued, in English.

“I don’t know,” Gansey sighed. “I was rather hoping you would know.”

“All my contacts say they don’t know about anyone in that area that should have those kind of abilities,” Adam huffed, frustration leaking through every word.

“Have you reached out to-“ Gansey stopped at the sound of someone talking to Adam from the other end of the line.

Gansey strained to hear what the voice was saying, but could only make out every third or fourth word, even with his advanced hearing. He could only understand the words: “Professor”, “Dirt”, “Andalusia”, “Motorcycle”, and “Lame”.

He cast a nervous look at Ronan, who was again lurking in the doorway. Ronan’s expression had shifted to one devoid of any feeling.

He wanted to reach out, to say something to stop Ronan from stalking out of the room, but stopped himself.

Instead, he waited for Adam to reply, but only heard him sigh about being on the phone. A rushed apology from the mysterious voice followed, and soon, Adam was back on the line.

“What were you saying? Have I reached out to who?”

It seemed the subject of whom the voice belonged to was one that would not be broached.

“That witch friend of your’s who was an expert on latent Dhamirism,” Gansey searched his mind for the name, but it was just out of his grasp. “The one from France? Uh, I think her name was-”

“Euphémie,” Adam sucked in a breath. “I would have already, but she’s dead.”

“Oh,” Gansey murmured. He remembered that she had been one of Adam’s friends for a long time, that he had known her since she was just a child being raised by her coven. “My condolences. Was it...”

“Old age,” Adam told him when he didn’t finish his question. “Just old age.”

“I see.”

Gansey had been a wanderer on the earth for so long, going from place to place. But there had been times he stayed long enough to watch a generation be birthed, grow, and die. And if Gansey was a wanderer, what did that make Adam, who moved like the wind, from place to place?

It was likely that Euphémie had been the first human that Adam had watched age until death. Her loss, and it’s effect on Adam, made him worry.

But then, he was always worried about Adam.

Gansey worried if he was getting enough to eat, if he was overworking himself, if he was sleeping enough, if he had a steady supply of blood.

He worried about a thousand things, large and small, important and admittedly inconsequential, regarding Adam. He couldn’t help it. Their first meeting had made it so that Gansey would always worry about him.

It had been a too gruesome and bloody of an affair to ever forget, to ever scrub clean from his mind.

“I could fly out there?” If Adam wouldn’t or couldn’t join them, then Gansey would always go to Adam, even if he didn’t know where exactly ‘there’ was. He knew Adam was an ocean away, yes, but he didn’t even know whether that ocean was the Pacific or the Atlantic.

Adam brushed his offer aside more gently than he expected, and asked him instead about the curse he mentioned during their last phone call.

“It was a coven in Wallachia, the one witch spoke in a language I didn’t know, it certainly wasn’t any Slavic or Romance language anyway. I only gathered that it was a curse, but, honestly? It may have just been my misunderstanding.”

“What led to the supposed cursing?” Adam prodded.

“A blood sacrifice,” Gansey winced. “They thought they could use my blood to make sure they had children with the gift.”

“Really?” Adam sounded intrigued.

“It didn’t work.”

“Obviously.”

“Adam.”

“Gansey,” Adam was frighteningly good at mimicking his tone.

“The curse is nothing,” Gansey sighed, ready to move on. “I only brought it up because I happened to read about it while looking for the entry where I was searching for some descendant of Paole’s. It was a coincidence that I stumbled upon it.”

“I see,” Adam didn’t sound satisfied. “What were you looking that up for?”

“Just that old pet theory of mine,” Gansey laughed. “That, even though they weren’t Dhampirs, descendants of Paole had certain, special gifts. You know, the old reports of them building force field’s with their minds, healing mortal wounds, that kind of thing.”

“You think Blue may be his descendant?”

“The possibility for anything is never zero.”

“Just small. Really, really small,” Adam reminded him. It was fair. He had been searching for a descendant of Arnold Paole for several hundred years now, as had Adam. So far, it had been fruitless. “So, did you find what you were looking for?”

“No,” Gansey hesitated. “It was torn out, I think.”

“By you?”

“By someone.”

“By someone not you? That sounds bad.”

“Not necessarily.”

“When do you think it happened?”

Gansey had to think about that. He knew he had gone through a melancholy phase around 1978, and spent a significant amount of time re-reading the entirety of his journal collection. He hadn’t noticed any pages missing then, which he told Adam.

“Which leaves us a 40 year window,” Adam groaned.

 _That’s not very long at all_ , Gansey thought but didn’t say. He doubted Adam would have appreciated it. Instead, he said, “The missing entry isn’t important, we keep getting distracted. If Blue is a descendant of Paole, if she had special gifts, don’t you think that would explain everything?”

Adam relented the point, though he sounded skeptical.

Helen was older then him, and, she would add, wiser, smarter, and prettier, too.

Despite having already looked like an older teen by the time Gansey had been born, she still somehow managed to look younger than him.

He suspected it was all the blood she drank - to the point of gluttony. That or it was all the fledglings she made, despite their parent’s condemnation of such things, that kept her so youthful looking that she barely passed for 20 to humans.

Gansey had agreed to meet her at the apartment she kept in D.C during her mourning period, but he hadn’t expected the sight that greeted him when she opened the door.

Her usually perfectly kept appearance was now marred by red rings around her eyes, and disheveled clothes.

The former made his heart pang in sympathy.

The latter made him cold with worry.

“Come in, come in,” she commanded briskly with a flourish of her hand. Her voice, at least, was steady and controlled.

He ignored the sleeping human male slumped over on the sofa (ignored the puncture wounds around his throat, too) and took a seat in a plush armchair.

“I’m sorry about Viktor,” Gansey said, repeating the words from his text several days ago. “I know he was one of your older fledglings, so I can understand why you’d be so-“

“No,” Helen cut in, everything about her suddenly cold. “No, Dickie, you don’t understand. Don’t pretend you do, it demeans us both. Someone who has never had a fledgling, like you, could never understand the way we feel when we lose one.”

“You’re right,” Gansey sighed. He would have argued that he understood loss just as well as she did, but then, the losses he had known weren’t of fledglings, and in that, at least, her argument was sound.

“How did it happen?”

Helen collapsed into the armchair beside him, and stared, unseeing, at the wall in front of her.

“By the old ways.”

“What?” Gansey gasped. “You said it was an accident!”

“Did I?” Helen mumbled. She slowly turned her head until she was looking directly at Gansey. “It wasn’t. It was a stake, made of hawthorn, dipped in the blood of a dead man.”

“A vampire hunter? In D.C?” Gansey couldn’t believe it.

The last Gansey had heard, the few vampire hunters that were left in America kept to New York, Tucson, and the Pacific Northwest. For one to be here in Virginia was strange. For one to hunt in Helen’s chosen city of the last 20 years was even stranger.

Not only would it have been brazen of the hunter to do such a thing, it would have been fatally foolish. Whoever it was had to have known Helen would seek some kind of revenge.

“You better warn Ronan,” Helen said quietly when the man on the couch began to stir, muttering the name ‘Yelena’ under his breath. “He may be a Dhampir, and therefore stronger than a fledgling, but he isn’t immune to a hunters skill with death.”

Indeed, if there was a hunter going around Helen’s city, then they may just be imprudent enough to go after a Lynch.

Gansey nodded, taking the warning as her dismissal.

They both rose from their chairs, Helen going to kneel before the man on the sofa, and Gansey making his way to the door. He paused there, his hand on the knob.

“Are you going to turn him?”

Helen let out a quick breath through her nose, one that could have been a laugh if there wasn’t so much sorrow under it.

“He’s been my lover for three years, but he doesn’t want it. Isn’t that cruel of him?”

Gansey didn’t answer. Once he closed the door behind him, he could hear the man finally wake up, how he called her Yelena, how his sister cooed quick words of love to him.

He thought his sister was cruel as well. The man didn’t even know her real name.

It was several weeks before he was able to see Blue again, since he was scrambling to work with Ronan and Helen to find the hunter while he was also coordinating with Adam, who reached out to the few contacts he still had in the various hunter associations, including the Sabbatarian Society, the Glogs, and the Kresniks.

Frustratingly, they couldn’t manage to sniff out a lead, and were left searching in vain. What was troubling, however, was that none of the hunter associations knew anything about a hunter in D.C. In fact, they seemed rather miffed at the idea of someone hunting there, of breaking the ancient agreements between the associations and the pure-bloods.

So, either the hunter was working with a hitherto unknown shadow organization that was capable of properly training hunters, or else they were dealing with a rogue who knew enough about hunting that they were able to evade the other societies, kill a pure-blood’s fledgling, and also escape the clutches of two pure-bloods and a particularly strong Dhampir.

Both were equally cause for a great deal of apprehension.

Blue must have seen how worn thin he was, how abysmally tired of of it all he had become, and decided to be merciful for once. She didn’t scowl or mock him at all while taking his order, and even almost smiled when she went back to the kitchen.

When she returned, she slid in across from him.

“Okay,” she sighed. “Why are you so gloomy today?”

Gansey let out a chuckle. “You sound like a bartender.”

Blue only raised her eyebrows and waved her hand, urging him to answer her question.

“I’ve been helping my sister,” he admitted. “And I’m just tired. Tired and worried about Ronan.”

Blue appeared confused at the name, but after a moment she snapped her fingers.

“Oh! Mr. Surly!”

“The very same.”

“What’s wrong?” She asked, her voice twinged with something he hadn’t heard from her before - concern.

“Probably nothing,” he said, picking disinterestedly at his fries. “Possibly something.”

“Do you wanna talk about it?”

“I would rather we didn’t,” he grimaced. He had done nothing but talk about it, and think about it, and lose sleep about it, for weeks. “Let’s talk about you. How have you been?”

“Are you asking because you genuinely want to know, or because you want a distraction?”

“A bit of both,” Gansey admitted. “But more of the former than the latter.”

“My boss has been on my case, finding fault with every. Little. Thing. And if he isn’t doing that, then he’s waxing on about some inane historical crap,” Blue said. She pulled Gansey’s neglected fries over to her side of the table and began to eat and talk at the same time. “My other co-workers are being real buttheads lately, too-“ she pointed her fry at a young woman at the hostess stand. “She keeps stealing my tips. I mean, can you believe it? The nerve.”

Gansey shook his head. “That seems rapacious.”

“I like that,” Blue laughed. “But you sound like my boss.”

“I’ve always been told I have an old soul,” Gansey offered.

In truth, he was just old, he thought with a small amount of existential amusement.

He wondered how old her boss was.

Did she consider 40 old? 60? 80? The concept of _old_ and _young_ between vampires and humans seemed so unbalanced.

Blue made a noncommittal noise and leaned over the table until she was peering directly into his eyes from a mere few inches away.

“They say that the eyes are the window to the soul,” she breathed. It felt warm against his check. While he didn’t share Ronan’s aversion to human smell, he didn’t think humans smelled good either. But Blue smelled warm, like cinnamon. He could hear the the rhythmic humming of her blood.

“Do they?” He managed to choke out around his suddenly dry throat.

She gave the slightest nod of her head.

He felt the weight of her steady gaze.

He wanted to run away from the consuming feeling of its intensity.

More than that though, he wanted to drown in it. To be made utterly undone by it.

As suddenly as it started, it was over, her attention going to a commotion nearby - a child had spilled the contacts of their glass all over the table and floor. She jumped up to rectify the issue, and Gansey had an overwhelming sense of loss at her leaving.

When he finally managed to let out a breath, it was strained and shaky.

"Ronan," He said, later that night, as the light of the moon coming in through the high windows caused strange shadows to appear around the room. "I fear you'll be angry with me."

"Gansey," His friend snapped, his voice a tincture of fear and worry and anger. "What the fuck did you do?"

"Will do," Gansey corrected, only, that didn't feel quite right either. "Am doing?"

Ronan sat up from where he was sprawled across the floor and crouched, a position that screamed he was ready to act; to tackle Gansey, to combat a threat, to run. To do any of a dozen different actions that were dependent upon the next few words Gansey would say.

"It's not about Adam," he hurried to add.

Ronan shifted, subtly. But enough for Gansey to know he was no longer on high alert.

"What the fuck did you do?" Ronan repeated, annoyed. "Wait, you didn't fuck with my truck, right?" He demanded, looking out, panicked, in the direction of the buildings parking lot.

Gansey lifted one hand to halt his friend from going to check on his beloved truck, and the other to partly cover his face in preparation of the blush he knew would soon appear.

"I think- no, there's no think about it- I am falling in love."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! If you want to scream about trc or literally anything else, you can over on tumblr at daleyposts *finger guns*
> 
> Comments, constructive or otherwise, give me super saiyan levels of power 🤗


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